Before long an active social life was under way, with Sybille and Eda going out most evenings, Eda never without her thermos of coffee and packet of cigarettes. Among the friends old and new whom Sybille saw at this period were Martha and Tom Matthews, Sylvester Gates and his wife, Jane Stockwood, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, “so charming, so good, so distinguished,” and also Charlotte Wolff, “the German witch doctor” first encountered in Sanary before the war. Sybille’s “return to London,” Charlotte wrote later, “meant more to me than I had anticipated. It not only led to an intimate friendship, but infused into my life the warmth and inspiration I had been starved of…Our friendship automatically included Eda…[who] was not given to much speech and only got a word in edgeways. But when she did speak it was with a perceptiveness and wisdom that made one prick up one’s ears. Sometimes our evenings extended into the early hours of the morning.”
Two other friends from Sanary whom Sybille now encountered were Eva Herrmann and Brian Howard. Eva, whom Sybille had last seen in California during the war, had arrived in London for a brief visit from Los Angeles, and during her stay she and Sybille were constantly in each other’s company. They lunched and dined together, made expeditions into the country, all the while absorbed in talking about their past, renewing a friendship that, after Eva’s return to the States, was to remain close for the rest of their lives. Brian, however, was far from easy since his heavy drinking and explosive rages frequently disrupted the occasions on which they met, leaving Sybille feeling both pity and disgust at his behaviour.
Her first encounter with Brian since the 1930s had been in Rome, where he had turned up with Sam Langford, his sailor boyfriend. On this occasion Sybille had been appalled by what she described as his “continued, unabated racketeering: drunkenness, waste, waste, waste and calling it naughtiness.” Not long afterwards Brian materialised again, this time at Les Bastides, since his mother had recently bought a house near Nice. One evening, just as Sybille and Allanah were sitting down to dinner, he had unexpectedly appeared, “drunk and ill, taut and angry from the first. He stayed till half past 11. It was very bad all the time.” Yet despite his behaviour Sybille remained fond of Brian, continuing to see him from time to time, their final meeting taking place in London in December 1957, when Brian, accompanied by Sam, gave Sybille and Eda a lavish dinner at Claridge’s. “He was very sweet that evening,” Sybille recalled. “Eda and I started tucking in with a will. ‘CROCODILES,’ said Brian.” Not long afterwards, in January 1958, Sam died, poisoned while in the bath by an accidental gas leak, and four days later Brian took an overdose and killed himself.
Another death, in 1957, was that of Eda’s one-time lover, Joan Black, Peter Churchill’s wife, who died in May, leaving her husband “a broken man,” Sybille wrote to Evelyn, and “I am very worried about Eda, all this has been very bad for her.” Despite Sybille’s brief passion for Joan during the 1930s, the relations between the two had remained contentious, but since Joan’s marriage their enmity had largely dissolved, the two maintaining an amicable if somewhat wary truce. “She never let me much into her life, but we shared some laughter and some of the good carefree things of living.”
The shock of these premature deaths had compelled Sybille to focus on her own life and the direction in which it was leading. She had achieved so little, wasted so much time, she admitted to Evelyn. “I feel that I have made fausse route in my life and that it is irretrievable now…I suspect that the foolish truth is that I have never grown up, and did not do so because I always missed having a real mother and father: parents in fact, a family. I don’t know whether even now I am ready for a life with one other adult. What I always wanted was somebody else’s home to be welcomed in: foster parents, a home: Pierre & Jacqueline; Aldous & Maria…rue de Lille. Of course this is too simple and pat, put like this. But there is truth enough in it, and it isn’t very nice because I am too old now, and no parents will want me, and anyhow I should have changed a long time ago. And I don’t feel being a writer is a substitute at all. It’s an odd moment for it all to come to the surface; but it has.”
To make matters worse, Sybille was again in a serious predicament financially, despite yet another large “loan” from Martha, this time of £1,000, accompanied by an irritable letter instructing her old pal to pull herself together and start earning a regular living. Yet as over the years Sybille had grown accustomed to accepting money from friends, she now resented such criticism. “The most unlikely people turn out wonderful when it counts. Others not,” Sybille remarked bitterly. Martha “has the human touch that withers.” Fortunately, however, the situation soon began to improve: the money from Simon & Schuster for A Legacy finally arrived, and as well Sybille was paid a generous fee by Vogue for an article she had written the previous year describing a trial at the Old Bailey.
Since attending her first court case nearly thirty years before, with Kate Muir at the Royal Courts of Justice, Sybille had been fascinated by legal process. “Going to law courts is a good education for a novelist,” she said later. “It provides you with the most extravagant material, and it teaches the near impossibility of reaching the truth.” Over the past couple of years she had attended court on several occasions, initially with the help of Fay Blacket Gill, herself a practising lawyer. Subsequently Sybille had sold the idea to Vogue of a report of an unexceptional trial at the Old Bailey, involving a young man accused of stealing a van-load of apples and cheeses.
“10:30 at the Old Bailey,” published in October 1956, is a remarkable piece of reporting, witty, dramatic, intensely visual, deftly recreating the procedure, the courtroom itself and its dramatis personae. As each actor comes on stage a graphic impression is given of appearance and manner, of the judge, with “the face of a very old woman,” of the prosecuting counsel, “bursting with self-importance” as he flamboyantly performs before a jury of “thin-boned, grey, absent-faced, thin-suited people.” By the end of the day the pale young man in the dock is found guilty and sentenced to thirty months in prison. “One does not like to look at the Prisoner and yet one does. During the last half-hour the Court has filled with broad-built men with close hair-cuts and despatch cases. They are Police Officers. The moment of truth has come. It is very sordid.”
The following year Sybille found herself eagerly focused on covering a trial about to open, a murder case that was to make an enormous impact and remain notorious for generations to come. The case was that of the “Bluebeard of the time,” John Bodkin Adams, a doctor from Eastbourne suspected of murdering over 160 of his patients. First, however, Sybille had to find a publisher whom she could interest in the project.
After the success of A Legacy in the States publishers in London had woken up to the fact that its author was now a writer of significant promise, this change in Sybille’s status a cause of considerable anxiety to George Weidenfeld. Mortified by his failure to promote the novel, Weidenfeld, “whiny and kind,” did his best to woo Sybille, begging her to stay with his firm and offering her a contract for a travel book; Sybille, however, was determined to leave, a decision that delighted her agent, Elaine Greene. “George just phoned me, full of anguish, and I have, I hope, persuaded him that he can do nothing but let you go quietly and without argument. I do think you are quite right to change; he was never the right publisher for you.” Meanwhile among other firms now circling were Rupert Hart-Davis, Hamish Hamilton and also William Collins, one of whose directors, Mark Bonham Carter, seemed the most sympathetic to Sybille’s plans.
Over lunch at the Ritz, Sybille explained to Bonham Carter that she had two projects in mind, first a book on the Adams trial, and then a novel. “He said yes how much,” Sybille reported to Evelyn. “Was screwing courage to ask for 500 when MBC said, as Adams was an interim book, what about an advance for that and a novel, over a period from now to 2½ years…[and] would 2,500 pounds seem reasonable…Tortoise! That’s a 1,000 pounds a year.” Next Sybille went to meet the
head of the firm, William Collins, at his office off St. James’s Street. During their discussion it was agreed that Collins would pay her £1,200 a year for two to three years on the understanding that both books would be delivered within that period. “Also they wish to buy—if poss—both A Legacy and The Sudden View and republish the lot. Golly.” For publicity purposes, Sybille was photographed by the young Antony Armstrong-Jones, who posed her leaning out of a window looking slightly startled, her heavy eye-shade almost but not quite concealing her eyes; before her on the wide sill is her typewriter, her fingers placed delicately on the keys.
The trial of Dr. Bodkin Adams at the Old Bailey began on 18 March 1957, and continued for seventeen days, up till then the longest murder trial in British history. Sybille, who had attended the committal hearing at Eastbourne in January, was present throughout, on the first day arriving in the early hours of the morning, well wrapped up in a camelhair coat, to be sure of a place near the front of the queue. “Two muffled individuals were standing in the Public Gallery entrance, another was crouching on an orange crate. It was night. ‘Good morning,’ said I. ‘Good morning,’ said the individual, ‘you’re the first female tonight; this gentleman and I have been here since midnight.’ Glorious.” By the second day such an early arrival was no longer necessary as Fay Blacket Gill had obtained a press pass for Sybille, allocating her a seat on a bench near the dock, “a position which, if far from ideal, is worlds apart from the isolated heights of the public gallery.” Throughout the trial, from 10:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, Sybille sat in the oak-panelled courtroom watching with absorption. “It is completely fascinating,” she told Evelyn, “with very dull stretches indeed.”
John Bodkin Adams, then in his late fifties, was a general practitioner, whose patients were mainly rich, elderly ladies, an unusual number of whom had died in questionable circumstances, nearly all bequeathing him substantial legacies. Although suspected of killing many of his patients, he was to be tried for the death of only one, a Mrs. Edith Morrell, the case provoking intense interest around the world, “the murder trial of the century,” as it was described in The Times. From the day of Adams’s arrest in December the previous year, Sybille had been absorbed in the case, determined to write about it, “to give an accurate and detailed coverage of what happened in court—minute by minute, hour by hour.” Shortly before proceedings began, she told Evelyn, “I’ve not had such a feeling of having come across the right material for myself for a long time.”
The Best We Can Do, Sybille’s lucid and informed account of those seventeen days in court, is a remarkable achievement. Watching throughout with intense concentration, she provides a compelling re-enactment of the entire procedure, tracking every argument, every change in pace and mood, showing us the stage—the court itself—and describing the performance of each member of the large cast. “I had often wanted to put down a trial exactly step by step,” she wrote later, “and in such a way that the reader would have all the evidence and nothing but the evidence, but also the manner in which it was given and extracted.” Arriving on the first morning, she finds the Old Bailey under siege, “police vans and press vans, cameras and cameramen, detective sergeants and CIDs…a line of special constables at every door, and thirty quarts of milk left for the cafeteria.” Inside, however, in Central Criminal Court Number One, “there is more than silence, there is quiet.”
Throughout the process the judge, Sir Patrick Devlin, a handsome figure in his grey wig, listens attentively, taking detailed notes, occasionally concealing a delicate yawn “behind his fine hand.” Below him the actors play out their parts, chief among them the large and aggressive prosecuting counsel, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, whose questions “rolled up sluggishly like so much thunder”; and for the defence Mr. Frederick Lawrence QC, deft and theatrical, who time and again presents with a flourish unsuspected evidence devastating to the prosecution. One by one the witnesses are summoned, the three nurses who looked after Mrs. Morrell, three doctors, intensively examined on the effects of the large doses of morphine and heroin prescribed; the police, led by Detective Superintendent Hannam of Scotland Yard; and the accused himself, Dr. Adams, who declines to bear witness, sitting silently day after day watching the case unfold, “spherical, adipose, upholstered in blue serge, red-faced, bald.”
After nearly three weeks the trial reaches its final stages, when over a period of two days the judge provides, with expert clarity and grace, a detailed résumé of the proceedings for the benefit of the jury. “You sit to answer one limited question,” he tells them, “has the prosecution satisfied you beyond reasonable doubt that the doctor murdered Mrs. Morrell?” The twelve men and women rise and leave the court, retiring for exactly forty-four minutes, after which they return, “settle themselves, consciously, in the box…‘And have you reached your verdict?’…‘Yes…Not guilty.’ ”
In The Best We Can Do, Sybille gives a meticulous and absorbing account of each day of the trial. Her narrative draws partly on her own memory and the notes taken at the time, but more substantially on the detailed reports that appeared in The Times, as well as on the printed version of Sir Patrick Devlin’s summing-up. Sybille completed the book in under a year, delivering the manuscript to Collins in March 1958. Dedicated to Eda, The Best We Can Do was published in October, receiving a number of respectful notices in the press, including one in the Daily Telegraph by John Sparrow, describing the work as vivid and skilful, with the characters in court coming “convincingly alive.” Particularly gratifying was an appreciative letter from Patrick Devlin. He had read the book with enjoyment, he told her. “You have made it sound so exciting & have produced something so readable (which I should have thought was almost impossible out of seventeen days of transcript) & so much of the writing is so good that it leaves me full of admiration.”
Yet, as before with A Legacy, it was in New York that the book was received with real enthusiasm; and as before it was Bob Gottlieb at Simon & Schuster who was largely responsible for its success. Gottlieb was said to love the book, to be “jumping with joy” at the prospect of publishing it. His excited reaction was reported by Evelyn, who had recently been taken on as one of Bob’s assistants, an ideal job for her as she had worked in publishing during the war and had always hoped one day to return. Now she was at Bob’s right hand as he set out to publicise The Trial of Dr. Adams, as it was titled in the States, contacting numbers of important judges, lawyers and academics for their opinions. One eminent scholar targeted by Bob was Eugene Rostow, dean of Yale Law School, who found it “A brilliant account. I know of no piece of trial reportage, save possibly Rebecca West’s, to compare with it in literary power.” After the book’s appearance in the spring of 1959 there were many adulatory reviews, including one in the New York Times by Martha’s husband, Tom Matthews, and an article in Esquire by Dorothy Parker. The Trial of Dr. Adams “is the book of my heart,” wrote Parker. “I think, and I do not say this lightly, hers is the best account of a murder trial I have ever read. Heaven bless you, Mrs. Bedford.”
In May 1958, almost six months before the book’s publication in London, Sybille and Eda had left for Portugal. Hoping to find a quiet refuge where they could work undisturbed throughout the summer, they had rented a small house in the north-west of the country, near the coast at Afife. The drive from England was long and arduous, both women in a state of nervous exhaustion. By the time they reached the border between Spain and Portugal it was pouring with rain, and “I had to go back some way, still in the rain, to find two soldiers, thin as crows under their black lacquered hats, to stamp our exit; three hundred yards further along, the Portuguese customs sat squat and mute in a trim, white house, sparkling rings on their fingers.” When they finally arrived at the Quinta S. José they were relieved to find the house much as they had hoped, “quiet, clean as whistles, in its own untidy garden and vineyard. Orchard and sea view. V. v. pleased.”
Looking forwar
d to weeks of hot sun, to swimming, exploring the countryside and sampling the local cuisine, they were to be disappointed at almost every turn. Apart from a pleasant few days spent staying at a vineyard in the Douro valley, nothing was as they had hoped: the weather was appalling, with drenching rain and far too cold to bathe. “We’ve had two dips each in the sea during the whole summer,” Sybille complained to Martha, confessing she had done no writing at all, overwhelmed by depression and homesick for England; she was “going through a very difficult time of self-hatred, ineffectualness, lovelessness, misery and guilt.” And Eda’s condition was even more wretched, she worryingly thin, unable to sleep or work and profoundly unhappy. It was now that Sybille began to understand how deeply Eda had been damaged, how her wartime experiences had changed her from a sociable, cheerful personality into a fragile depressive, irrationally frightened, prone to intense anxiety and wholly lacking in confidence. Although Sybille was as much in love as ever, she was unable to forget Martha’s words. “Eda will never decide anything because she cannot, and her motives are not what you think (gratitude, duty, affection etc) but plain terror.”
Longing to leave but with nowhere to go, the two women had to resign themselves to remaining in a country regarded as “deeply alien and disturbing.” Fortunately, however, towards the end of their stay the atmosphere was lightened by the arrival of Pierre and Simone Mimerel, who had driven from France with their nineteen-year-old nephew. “I am so pleased they are here, and it is fun too,” Sybille noted in her diary. After a few days all five set off for a tour of the south of the country, then on to Seville, Cadiz, Ronda, and finally to Barcelona, Sybille cheered by the liveliness of Spain after what she described as “the hog slumber of Portugal.” When the Mimerels left, she and Eda decided to spend a few days on Ibiza, of which Eda had happy memories from before the war, but that, too, turned out to be disappointing. They soon became “fed up” with the island, “a German and lower-middle-class English holiday colony with dumb natives.”
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